Our View: Port truckers today’s indentured servants – AZCentral.com

Editorial board, The Republic | azcentral.com Published 8:09 a.m. MT June 19, 2017 | Updated 7 hours ago

A USA TODAY Network investigation found a predatory scheme that ensnared thousands of immigrant truck drivers at the port. Scott Hall

Reyes Castellanos lost his house after too much debt mounted. He continues to work as truck driver, working long hours in the port of Long Beach. (Photo: Omar Ornelas, The Desert Sun)

Evil comes in many guises, but one of its most noxious is when people of means exploit people of no means and bleed them of the few possessions they own.

This was the story of indentured servitude in colonial America and of slavery in the pre-Civil War South. Its the story of Mexican immigrants who picked lettuce by short hoe and wrecked their backs for a pittance.

John Steinbeck captured the outrage in The Grapes of Wrath. And the memorable 1940s film of that novel can still evoke anger at the cruel California land barons who abused Oklahomas itinerant poor.

How trucking companies forced drivers into debt, worked them past exhaustion and left them destitute

This type of mistreatment should have been left to the dark corners of our past, but here we are again, abusing the least among us. An expos by Brett Murphy, a reporter for the USA TODAY Network, tells the story of large trucking enterprises in Southern California exploiting immigrant laborers and leaving them with virtually nothing.

People who speak little English and live meager lives are used to build corporate profits shipping goods that will eventually be sold in some of Americas best-known retail stores.

The so-called port truckers, Murphy reports, move almost half of the nations container imports out of Los Angeles ports.

Hundreds and possibly thousands of drivers are trapped in a system of forced labor that is almost impossible to comprehend by modern sensibilities.

The companies in Southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford, Murphy writes. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.

One man caught in this trap was Samuel Talavera Jr., who in 2013 leased a truck from his employer to deliver dishwashers and tires to warehouses.

The job was so demanding, he had little time at home, working up to 20 hours a day for six days a week and sleeping in the company parking lot. Eventually his truck broke down, and the 67 cents he was making a week was not nearly enough to make repairs. His company would fire him and seize his truck, Murphy wrote, along with $78,000 he had paid on it.

While these truckers haul the goods of big retailers, those retailers can avoid accountability because they dont directly hire port trucking companies. This is a classic case where the little guy gets screwed, said Jeffrey Klink, a former fraud prosecutor and corporate ethics professor at the University of Pittsburghs Graduate School of Business.

The civil-rights leader Julian Bond describes the California port truckers as the new black tenant farmers.

The abuse appears to be widespread.

Since 2010, at least 1,150 port truck drivers have filed claims in civil court or with Californias labor commission, Murphy reports.

Judges have sided with drivers in more than 97 percent of the cases heard, ruling time after time that port truckers in California cant legally be classified as independent contractors, he writes. Instead, they are employees who, by law, must be paid minimum wage and cant be charged for the equipment they use at work.

But the court rulings have not addressed drivers allegations that their employers are barring them from leaving work or requiring them to work hours that exceed federal law.

With so much legal action over a span of years, the abuses seem chronic and cannot be ignored by federal and California authorities.

Fortunately the kind of worker exploitation seen in Californias port trucking industry is far more rare than it was in John Steinbecks America.

I dont know of anything even remotely like this, said Stanford Law School professor William Gould, speaking of the port trucking lease contracts.

As Americans, we are tasked to ensure that such things become even more rare. The abuse of port truckers must end now.

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Our View: Port truckers today's indentured servants - AZCentral.com